More people take BPO training in Philippines

With the business process outsourcing (BPO) sector being the only industry still offering thousands of jobs, more and more individuals are signing up to be trained to enter the field.

Human resource solutions provider ExcelAsia is now training 1,500 people a month to go into BPO, compared with 700 individuals in the past, the company said.

As around 50 percent of ExcelAsia’s clients come from the BPO sector, company president Rita Trillo-Ugarte said business should be brisk for ExcelAsia in the coming months.

“Our hit rates show that upon completion of our training programs, 80 percent of those trainees successfully get hired,” she said in a statement Tuesday.

ExcelAsia offers various training programs in its Makati, Alabang, Cebu and Bacolod sites. It is now in the process of setting up a site within the EastwoodCity area in Quezon City, which should be operational in April or May.

To enable its clients to meet their employment needs, Trillo-Ugarte said ExcelAsia held job fairs every Monday in all of its sites to screen potential BPO practitioners.

“Nobody goes home empty-handed. Should they not qualify at the time of their application, we will send them to our free call center training program. After completing our training, we will send them out for client endorsement,” she said.

Around half of the executives and human resource managers in the BPO space see their workforce requirements growing by as much as 15 percent this year, according to a survey jointly conducted by the Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPAP) and Outsource2Philip-pines.

BPO executives, on average, expected to expand their employee base by 6 to 10 percent in 2009, the report said.

The highest growth rate would be posted by BPO firms with an employee count of between 5,000 and 10,000 individuals.

Some 33 percent of them expected to boost their employee numbers by as much as 11 to 15 percent in 2009, the report stated.

Small and medium-sized BPO companies saw their personnel requirements growing by around the same rate as the industry average, the report added.

BPAP research director Gigi Virata said the projected growth in size of the BPO workforce this year could be attributed to the global recession, as more companies seek ways to cut costs without sacrificing service quality.

Sectors expecting the most growth included back-office processes, IT services and infrastructure management and website development — all considered complex and high-value sectors.